States 0; H. R. 1

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are not favorably impressed by the U. S. House of Representatives’ election reform bill, H. R. 1. Their opposition is not based on partisan grounds:

Over the weekend, the Daily Beast posted an article by Jessica Huseman of Votebeat, a nonprofit news group covering electoral issues. She calls H.R.1’s tenets “laudable” but says the bill “was written with apparently no consultation with election administrators, and it shows.” An unnamed Democratic state-level official is quoted as saying that he’d follow the law: “But I can’t guarantee it’s not going to be a total clusterf— the first election.”

Ms. Huseman knocks H.R.1’s “alarmingly prescriptive solutions,” its “deeply unrealistic time frames,” and its added costs with “no assured long-term funding.” How’s this for reportorial color? “Election administrators used the F-word a lot during my chats with them,” she writes, “frustrated because they’ve eagerly sought federal funding and basic attention to their offices, only to be handed impossible goals.”

concluding:

Fifty states have their own voting laws, and it makes no sense to micromanage them all from Congress, down to the glue on the envelopes. Democrats have dumped H.R.1 on the public as a half-baked brainstorm because they’re in a rush to rig the rules to their advantage.

I don’t know what the House’s motivations are. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest they’re trying to avoid a repetition of the 2020 presidential election in future elections. They won’t accomplish it this way. In all likelihood the Supreme Court will declare a law with the provisions of this bill an unconstitutional arrogation of state powers to the federal government; the most they can hope to accomplish by it is to regulate federal elections, complicating already complicated discrepancies between state and federal election law, cf. “provisional ballots”.

I will say that H. R. 1 demonstrates the good sense in the provision in Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” of 25 years ago: no unfunded mandates. If you want to reduce opposition to your mandates from the states, pay for them.